Louis XVII of France.
Louis XVII of France
Louis XVII (27 March 1785 – 8 June 1795), born Louis-Charles, was the younger son of King Louis XVI of France and QueenMarie Antoinette.
He was at birth given the title Duke of Normandy. His older brother, Louis Joseph, died in June 1789, a little over a month before the start of the French Revolution. At his brother's death he became the heir-apparent to the throne and the Dauphin of France, a title he would hold until 1791, when the new constitution accorded the heir apparent the style of Prince Royal of France.
When his father was executed on 21 January 1793, during the middle-period of the French Revolution, he became "King of France" in the eyes of the royalists. However, since France was by then a republic, and Louis XVII had been imprisoned from August 1792 until his death from illness in 1795 at the age of 10, he never actually governed. His title stems from monarchist theory, whereby there is always a monarch; on the death of one monarch, the heir apparent or failing that the heir presumptive are immediately monarch. His title was the reason why on his death his uncle took the regnal name ofLouis XVIII of France rather than Louis XVII, retaining it upon the Bourbon Restoration in 1814.
Biography
Lost Dauphin claimants
As rumors quickly spread that the body buried was not that of Louis-Charles and that he had been spirited away alive by sympathizers, the legend of the "Lost Dauphin" was born. When the Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1814, some one hundred claimants came forward. Would-be royal heirs continued to appear across Europe for decades afterward and some of their descendants still have small but loyal retinues of followers today. Popular candidates for the Lost Dauphin includedJohn James Audubon, the naturalist;Eleazer Williams, a missionary fromWisconsin of Mohawk Native Americandescent; and Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a German clockmaker. Why is Donna trying to hurry anyone's death? However, DNA testing conducted in 1993 proved that Naundorff was not the Dauphin.[14]
Naundorff
Karl Wilhelm Naundorff's story rested on a series of complicated intrigues. According to him, Barras determined to save the dauphin in order to please Joséphine de Beauharnais,[citation needed] the future empress, having conceived the idea of using the dauphin's existence as a means of dominating the comte de Provence in the event of a restoration. The dauphin was concealed in the fourth storey of the Tower, a wooden figure being substituted for him. Laurent, to protect himself from the consequences of the substitution, replaced the wooden figure with a deaf mute, who was presently exchanged for the scrofulous child of the death certificate. The deaf mute was also concealed in the Temple. It was not the dead child, but the dauphin who left the prison in the coffin, to be retrieved by friends before it reached the cemetery.
Naundorff arrived in Berlin in 1810, with papers giving the name Karl Wilhelm Naundorff. He said he was escaping persecution and settled at Spandau in 1812 as a clockmaker, marrying Johanna Einert in 1818. In 1822 he removed toBrandenburg an der Havel, and in 1828 toCrossen, near Frankfurt (Oder). He was imprisoned from 1825 to 1828 for coining, though apparently on insufficient evidence, and in 1833 came to push his claims in Paris, where he was recognised as the dauphin by many persons formerly connected with the court of Louis XVI. Expelled from France in 1836, the day after bringing a suit against the duchess of Angoulême for the restitution of the dauphin's private property, he lived in exile until his death at Delft on 10 August 1845, and his tomb was inscribed "Louis XVII., roi de France et de Navarre (Charles Louis, duc de Normandie)". The Dutch authorities who had inscribed on his death certificate the name of Charles Louis de Bourbon, duc de Normandie (Louis XVII) permitted his son to bear the name de Bourbon, and when the family appealed in 1850–51, and again in 1874, for the restitution of their civil rights as heirs of Louis XVI, no less an advocate than Jules Favre pled their cause.
Richemont
Baron de Richemont's tale that Jeanne Simon, who was genuinely attached to him, smuggled him out in a basket, is simple and more credible, and does not necessarily invalidate the story of the subsequent operations with the deaf mute and the scrofulous patient, Laurent in that case being deceived from the beginning, but it renders them extremely unlikely.
Richemont, alias Henri Éthelbert-Louis-Hector Hébert, was in prison in Milan for seven years and began to put forward his claims in Paris in 1828. In 1833, he was again arrested, was brought to trial in the following year and condemned to twelve years' imprisonment. He escaped after a few months and left the country, to return in 1840. He died at Gleizé on 10 August 1853, the name of Louis Charles de France being inscribed on his tomb until the government ordered its removal.
Williams
Another pretender was Reverend Eleazar Williams, a Mohawk-born Protestant missionary, and an advocate for land rights of Native Americans. While at the house Francis Vinton, William began shaking and trembling upon seeing a portrait of Antoine Simon, a member of the sans-culottes, claiming the portrait has "haunted me, day, and night, as long as I can remember." Simon was rumored to have physically abused the dauphin while he was imprisoned at the Temple.[15] Francis Vinton was convinced by Eleazar William's reaction, that Williams was Louis-Charles. Williams claims he has no recollection of how he escaped his imprisonment at the Temple, or his early years in France.[15]
He was a missionary to Native Americans when the prince de Joinville, son of Louis-Philippe, met him, and after some conversation asked him to sign a document abdicating his rights in favour of Louis-Philippe, in return for which he, the dauphin (alias Eleazar Williams), was to receive the private inheritance which was his. This Eleazar Williams refused. Williams's story is generally regarded as false.
Burial
Louis XVII's remains were not interred with ceremony. "At seven o'clock the police commissary ordered the body to be taken up, and that they should proceed to the cemetery. It was the season of the longest days, and therefore the interment did not take place in secrecy and at night, as some misinformed narrators have said or written; it took place in broad daylight, and attracted a great concourse of people before the gates of the Temple palace." Added, "The funeral entered the cemetery of Ste. Marguerite, not by the church, as some accounts assert, but by the old gate of the cemetery. The interment was made in the corner, on the left, at a distance of eight or nine feet from the enclosure wall, and at an equal distance from a small house, which subsequently served as a school. The grave was filled up,—no mound marked its place, and not even a trace remained of the interment! Not till then did the commissaries of police and the municipality withdraw, and enter the house opposite the church to draw up the declaration of interment."[16]
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